His brother's keeper

Michael and Daniel Ricciardi at home in Holden. Steve King photo HOLDEN - Dan Ricciardi stood at the podium in Holy Cross' Rehm Library on April 26 and faced his audience. There were his parents, front and center, friends, advisors and professors, all there to hear him present his treatise as the Fenwick Scholar, one of the college's highest honors.

"Possession to Insanity" had taken Dan a year to research and write, nearly 200 pages exploring America's evolving perceptions of mental illness during its early history. His lecture would capture the essence of all the time and work he'd poured into the document, an academic journey that had consumed his entire senior year.

Dan peered past the microphone, spotting Michael. Michael knew something special was about to occur, though the details were lost. The 18-year-old autistic man possessed the height and heft of a football player, yet his mind had long stopped processing information the way it should. Still, here he was, respectful, quiet, at times moving his fingers in patterns that made perfect sense to him, or rocking his body to the rhythm of an internal metronome. Dan smiled at his brother, and he began to speak.

Dan before his Fenwick presentation. Wright and his wife Susan have started a Web site, www.autismspeaks.com, to raise awareness of the condition. * * * * *

Dan was four years old when Michael was born, and he was immediately smitten with his baby brother. He envisioned a lifetime together spent playing catch and rolling trucks across the floors of their Holden home.

Michael grew normally, and was starting to talk in complete sentences when, as he neared his first birthday, his family noticed he was becoming increasingly withdrawn, his interactions with other people dwindling. His change in behavior was accompanied by terrible headaches and severe esophageal reflux that caused him to vomit frequently and kept him up all night. The eyes that were once bright and perceptive developed a vacant look. And Michael played games with his fingers, not unlike the character of an autistic boy on the popular TV series "St. Elsewhere."

The Ricciardis knew something was seriously wrong with their son and suspected autism. Michael's mother, Kathy, a chemist with General Electric, and father, Paul, an oncologist at the University of Massachusetts Hospital, were used to approaching problems through the logic of science. But here, they'd entered a black hole, seeking confirmation of a diagnosis no doctor seemed willing to deliver.

"My parents kept me involved every step of the way," Dan recalls during a recent interview in his parents' living room. "Talking with

other siblings of autistic children, I

realize that one of the biggest things is the fear of the unknown. My family had to wage a battle to get Michael diagnosed; we'd seen him take steps back, saw how his interactions had changed."

The Ricciardis finally got their answer from a team of doctors at Children's Hospital in Boston.

"When they said, 'Michael is autistic,' I told them, 'Thank you,' and they all hugged me," Kathy Ricciardi says. "I needed the diagnosis because I couldn't help him until I knew what we were up against."

Life with Michael was fraught with challenges. Kathy and Paul refused to exclude him from anything, even when his behavior could be disruptive.

"We never stopped taking him anywhere," Kathy says. "I always felt that if I expected certain things from Michael, then he would live up to them."

Kathy, who quit her G.E. job to care for her son, recounts tales of being accosted by people in malls and getting thrown out of restaurants, with one woman at a Westboro eatery proclaiming, "You have some nerve bringing someone like that in a place like this."

Michael was 10 at the time.

"I said to myself, 'This is my battleground, this is where I make my stand.' We weren't going anywhere," she recalls. "Later, in the car, I cried like a fool."

The Ricciardis even went "church shopping" when Kathy felt they'd worn out their welcome at other congregations.

Dan took it all in. He was never embarrassed by Michael, and, in fact, was fiercely protective. Whatever teasing he endured in those early years was blunted by the awareness of his brother's struggle.

"Anything I was getting, he was getting 10 times worse," Dan says. "I can remember very clearly a school program about Martin Luther King, and how we learned about civil rights and respect for others. And here was Michael, not getting respect because he was different."

With learning and speech therapy, as well as frequent exposure to social situations, Michael, as Dan says, "started to come back into the fold."

During the interview, Michael's bus from the Developmental Learning Center in West Boylston, which he attends daily, pulls up in front of the house. He bounds up the stairs and makes a beeline for the reporter, vigorously shaking his hand with a strong grip. He circles the room, rearranging the pillows on the couches and adjusting the blinds, enacting the rituals that help re-orient him.

Finally, Michael settles in, sometimes resting his head on his mother's lap as she massages his scalp or shoulders. At one point, kneeling on the floor facing each other, they lean forward and tap foreheads. "Why do I love you so much," Carol asks with a grin.

His speech is limited, the words sometimes decipherable only to those who know him best.

"Where did you go today?" his mother asks. "Buh." (Bus) "Who took you?"

"Bih." (Bill)

But there are exceptions. Kathy remembers all the long sleepless nights spent with young Michael when he was about a year old. She would repeat to him over and over, "Mommy loves you this much - you betcha!" and fling her arms open. One day, about two years later, Kathy was in the kitchen when Michael came in and tugged on her pants leg. She asked, "What is it?" And Michael said, "Mommy ... this much ... you betcha!" It remains their personal greeting to this day.

They share inside jokes about Michael's habits, including the time he "stole" Dan's bed. Rather than stay in his own room, Michael preferred to sleep on the floor beside his brother's bed, creating his own nest from pillows and blankets he'd filch off the bed while Dan slept. He became so adept at it, he could literally remove a sheet from beneath the sleeping Dan without waking him. Finally, when Michael started to physically crowd his brother out of the bed to make space for himself, Dan surrendered and moved into Michael's room.

Michael was a familiar face at Holy Cross during Dan's years there, becoming something of a celebrity among the students and faculty. His penchant for orderliness once spurred him to rearrange two shelves of books at the school library that he'd perceived as visually out of whack.

"The librarians were freaking out," Dan laughs as Michael comes to the couch and grasps his brother's hand. "Michael had no respect for the Dewey Decimal System."

The brothers have always been close. When Michael spent his first day at the Early Childhood Center at the First Baptist Church of Holden, Dan was so distressed at the prospect of his brother being away from home for the first time that Kathy had to pull him out of Jefferson Elementary School and drive him to the ECC to prove that Michael was fine.

When Michael was 7 years old and Dan 11, a special dinner to raise autism awareness was held in Worcester, at which Michael was presented a key to the city. The boys accepted it together, with Dan delivering remarks on behalf of his brother.

"I said, 'Please remember me as a part of our community, and the city,'" Dan says. "Our crusade was beginning."

The Ricciardis received a blow in 1995 when Paul Ricciardi was diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live.

"When he was diagnosed I was in sixth grade. I was really worried about Michael and how he'd react. I felt like Michael never really knew what was behind that next door. It was the first time in my life when I asked, 'Why us?" Dan recalls.

With the aid of a battery of treatments, Paul defied the odds. A couple of months after surgery he was back seeing patients. Eleven years after that initial prognosis, he's working a full schedule at UMass.

* * * * * The seed for the Fenwick project was planted when Dan took a class called "Worcester and Its People" his sophomore year. As part of the class he visited Camp Joy at the mostly abandoned Worcester State Hospital, whose boarded-up buildings struck him as silent testimony to the segregation of the mentally ill. Dan began piecing together the notion of examining the treatment of mental illness through the prism of history.

Dan's motivation deepened his junior year when he spent a semester in Luxembourg. He was particularly moved by a course in French history that in his words "centered on how best to commemorate and preserve the history of silenced victims of oppression."

Upon his return to Holy Cross, with thoughts of Michael never far from his mind, he committed himself to the mission of applying as a Fenwick Scholar (one of three ultimately named), crafting a 45-page proposal that he would develop into a full-blown treatise his senior year "to give a voice to the mentally ill by looking closely at their history, a history often passed over by mainstream historians."

Dan's project was accepted by the eight-member Fenwick Committee, and with the help of advisor Ross Beales, a Holy Cross history professor and fellow Holden resident, and from professors and friends, he dedicated his senior year to exploring the treatment of mental illness in the late Colonial and early national periods.

Scouring primary sources in the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Athenaeum, he uncovered an uneasy relationship between everyday American citizens and the mentally ill among them. The lack of knowledge about mental illness was so profound, its victims were often assumed to be possessed by demons or suffering from "distractions," that required "cures" ranging from exorcisms to cagings to the Colonial version of shock treatments - dumping buckets of frigid water on unsuspecting patients.

"Michael would probably have been confined in an asylum," Dan notes. "That helps remind me why I did this."

Taking particular interest in Dan's research was Robert Wright, chairman of General Electric and NBC television, a Holy Cross grad with an autistic grandson, who met with

* * * * *

The next step for the Ricciardi brothers is less clear. Dan is now working at Mellon Financial in Boston, and will be living in the city - his first long-term separation from Michael since college. Some day, he says, he may pursue a Ph.D., but he believes it necessary to experience the working world before plunging into another academic cycle. Regardless of his career path, he intends to continue advocating for the autistic.

He worries about the day when Michael will no longer be able to live at home.

"I'm confident he knows how much I love him," he says.

I've learned more from Michael than I've learned from all my years of education. His courage - you can't learn that from books, it can't be taught. You have to see it, observe it.

"How can I be scared knowing what he does every day? My mom and dad have never stopped fighting, and neither will I.

"I wouldn't trade what I have with Michael for anything else in the world."

Autism facts  1 in 166 children is diagnosed with autism  1 in 104 boys is on the autism spectrum  67 children are diagnosed per day  A new case is diagnosed almost every 20 minutes  More people will be diagnosed with autism this year than with AIDS, diabetes and cancer combined  Boys are four times more likely than girls to have autism  Autism costs the nation more than $90 billion per year, a figure expected to double in the next decade